Show
by Gone and forgoten
Summary: more of a "future" mythology than anything, tale of a man into a black hole, and the effects on the "Everythought"


In the darkness of the amphitheatre, the Everythought was abuzz. They had expected the separation to be traumatic, of course, but they had not expected this.

They watched as Unit Cygnus X-1 threw himself against the steel walls of his ship. Peering out from his eyes, feeling from within his body, they observed with concern as he moaned and screeched himself hoarse, flopped about on the floor, scrambled back and forth across the cramped chamber as if desperately searching. After an hour of complete hysteria, he simply collapsed onto the floor and began clawing at himself, leaving bright, raw scratches across his bare face, chest and legs. When there was too much flesh jammed beneath his fingernails to continue, he shivered, crumpled, and began to sob.

Needless to say, they were upset. Unit Cygnus X-1 had been their most capable component. He had been trained even from before birth for the moment of his inevitable separation from the Everythought. Their soothing words had pulsed and radiated through the amniotic fluid in which he had grown, permeating his mind and filling every atom of his being with the foreknowledge of this inexorable event. It had been his destiny, and they had whispered it into his ears when those were nothing more than bundles of cells, scarcely functional. How well they remembered it.

And yet here he was: pale, naked, crumpled in the corner of the perfect ship they had built him. The splintered thoughts battling for primacy in his mind were not at all what they had expected. The Everythought were of one mind, because they could be no other way, and that mind had predicted a trepidation, a hesitancy perhaps, but ultimately and finally a resolute adherence to one's duty. Loyalty to Man, to Earth. To the Everythought.

Instead they felt in him only a dull, wriggling, fear. A ripple of worry spread across the mass of their minds like the surface of a pond. Was he capable? Would he destroy himself before the proper time? Would the show go on?

And it was a show, of course, because that was all that was left to them. Being one, knowing all, there was scarcely anything left in the wide Universe to hold them in thrall, to provide the mystery and curiosity a race like Man required. Only this last discovery; this last uncharted domain, to which they had sent their brightest part. Doubt crackled throughout the core of the Everythought.

Would he provide the entertainment they had created him for?

Would the mysteries of the Black Hole finally lay open to them?

They listened intently.

Unit Cygnus X-1 hurt everywhere. The metal floor was like ice and his scratches stung. His eyes throbbed in time with his heart, drying tears leaving salt on the lids and blurring his vision. His throat felt like a desert, parched and rutted with the strain of shouting at no one. He was all alone.

He had been alone for weeks now, in some sense. The ship had left Earth and arced away on a mile-long scimitar of plasma. It had carried him, its sole passenger, as far from Earth as any component of the Everythought had ever been. He had certainly been alone then, physically. But of course, he had not even known what it meant to be alone then.

For then, his head had been filled with the singular vision and accord of the Everythought. He had not been_he,_but rather part of a tranquil and harmonious whole. A tiny component of a single mind, he had let his every thought represent but one firing neuron in Man's greater brain. He had drifted on the glassy surface of a warm ocean, and his brothers and sisters had floated with him, never touching one another, but all moving together in a perfect, unbroken consciousness. The swells would come and go, the ocean gently canting in patterns too large for any individual to see, but which—he had faithfully believed—interwove to reveal the Right and True Path, immense emotional patterns that illuminated the way of a Mankind united, transcendent over the petty rivalry of individual egos, a Mankind at last _made one_.

It had been warm and dark; now it was cold and bright.

He lay still in the ship's cabin and felt every new sensation like an unwelcome slime covering his body. His nose was stuffed. His right elbow was sore. Everything was his, his, his. Where before he had been part of something large and strong, he now felt his weakness acutely, as if he were going to be crushed by a boot at any moment. He tried rolling onto his stomach. The flesh of his belly and groin contracted when it made contact with the freezing cabin floor. Comfort had not been something he cared about before the separation; now he ached for it. This need made him very weak, he thought. He felt like an ancient warrior, pitted against the black of the infinite universe and armed only with a sharpened stick. No, not even that. He stood alone, in a colloseum of wheeling stars, awaiting the first attack of an unknown assailant—and he stood naked.

Unit Cygnus X-1 pushed himself off of the ground with his arms and tentatively took his feet. Some of the panic he had felt earlier was dissipating; the knot in his stomach had ceased its upward thrusting and instead settled somewhere deeper inside his stomach as an intense dread. He had never even thought of life as a battle before, he mused. Then again, he had been a part of something strong before, and the truly strong rarely question their own might.

He decided to sit down. There was a chair, after all. It was about the only thing that had been provided for him, and he had asked for nothing more. It grew out of the metal floor like a giant crystal, square and sharp at every corner. A little needle in one of the arms gave him his food, and a hole in the seat could be opened to accept his waste. There was nothing more in the room. No windows, no doors, only a dull metal. He didn't even know how large a ship it was, or where he was, or when he would arrive at his destination. He only knew that the end of the journey meant his death, and that the prospect of his ceasing to exist frightened him now in a way he couldn't have fathomed before. He sat in the chair—freezing cold, again—and carefully placed an arm on each armrest. Had he really spent the entirety of the long trip in this position, he wondered? It had felt so comfortable and so right, to sit in silence and stillness, conversing with his fellow Man and allowing the machines to do their work. He couldn't imagine that now: sitting still and motionless for days. In fact, he could hardly stand the cabin at all. He glared at the image of himself that the walls reflected back, a tan smear across their gray surface. He blinked, and the room seemed to get smaller around him. He wasn't sure where all the light was coming from, but it was blinding.

He remembered with a start that he was not, in fact, alone. No, not alone at all. How could he have forgotten? He was still part of the Everythought, still connected, but it was one-way only, a voyeuristic arrangement rather than any sort of unity. In truth, he was so much more than merely naked. He was stripped bare, pinned open on an autopsy table, organs squirming under inquisitive pokes. When he had been a part of it, a member among billions, equally sharing in the knowledge and experience of Man, it had been heaven. But now, separate and yet still exposed, he felt cheated. Blood rose in his face. He shifted in his seat and felt the metal chair back rub against the three dime-sized nubs running up his spine, where cortical shunts had been inserted. He remembered the gene therapy, the behavioral training, the drug therapy, all meant to prepare him for the experience of serving as a one-way radio in flesh, a closed circuit television camera unto himself. A hundred billion souls were crammed within his skull, observing every thought and physical sensation he had. It must have been crowded in there, he thought, and smiled for the first time. Standing room only.

He imagined the Earth slowly revolving within his skull, which was a dark cavern. The planet rotated past the two bright viewing screens that were his eyes, and then into darkness, the back of his skull, where Man peered instead at the dim thoughts that danced across the inside curve of his head like flickering shadows cast by a fire. Members of the Everythought jostled this way and that on the tiny globe, making sure they soaked up every last detail of his experience. Those who could see the ship relayed the images to the others. Those who could not see kept their arms outstretched and eyes closed, waiting to intercept his thoughts and relay _them_to the group.

Everyone listened.

They were watching even now, he thought, observing even the images of them his imagination was conjuring up. Unit Cygnus X-1 pictured two mirrors inside the cavern, set up facing one another so that the image of the Earth was reflected down into infinity on either side, becoming dimmer and cloudier as it moved back into the unreality of a reflection of a reflection of a reflection of a reflection of a mirror that didn't exist.

The ship rocked violently. Unit Cygnus X-1 went sprawling head first out of the chair and crashed against the floor, knocking the wind out of him. While he struggled to catch his breath, the ship shook again, as if it had run off an invisible road and was now barreling down a dirt embankment. It did not let up, but intensified as he rubbed his sore neck and clambered back to the chair in the middle of the room. The constant sounds of vibrating equipment and intermittent squeals of stressed metal reverberated through the cabin as the ship tried to break itself apart.

Unit Cygnus X-1 knew what it meant. His legs wobbled beneath him as he settled back into his seat, far more than he could blame on the turbulence. His heart was pounding and his breath came short and shallow, though he couldn't tell if that were from the fall or this new physical sensation. He thought perhaps that he was dying. Could one die from fear? He had never felt an emotion so extreme and dischordant. His palms slipped on the armrests as he tried to grip them, and a strange buzzing light-headedness invaded him. How terrible, he thought, how terrible for them if the player were simply to expire before the show began. If their radio transmitter died moments before the curtain were to open, and they sent nothing but a lifeless corpse through the Black Hole.

Because that was what it was, he thought, gripping the armrests again and again. He was nearly there, riding in a ship with no controls and only one course, without hope of deviation. They had postponed the separation as long as possible, and now he was almost to the Black Hole. He would get sucked in, in to death, and Man would watch from inside his brain, watch and applaud and at last be secure in a complete knowledge of the Universe's last mystery.

He thought he must die, if it kept on like this. The darkness that lay ahead of him and the now-alien being that filled his mind worked like a vice, pushing him from outside and inside and squeezing him until he thought he must have the life crushed out of him. But he didn't. He didn't die; he just breathed harder and faster, and clutched at the seat, and felt the hundred billion inside him like a nest of spiders scrabbling around and pushing at the back of his eyes. Ahead of him, though he could not see it, the black hole waited to rip him into a trillion single atoms and stretch him into nothingness and absorb him forever.

Unit Cygnus X-1 made a noise. A dumb, wailing noise that rose and mingled with the intensifying roar of the ship. He moaned again and again, and finally stood when the palms of his hands were raw from rubbing the warm metal of the seat. His elbow still ached, and his chest still stung. His throat and lungs were on fire, and the faster he breathed the more his head began to tingle. The ship started to lurch, and he stumbled around the cabin, wrapping his arms around himself and steadying himself against a wall when he had to. He could almost feel the lewd anticipation of the crowd inside of him. They were leaned forward in their seats like Romans awaiting the lion. The lights in the cabin seemed brighter than ever. It would be soon.

He would die, he thought. He would die he would die he would die. He would die forever, stuck between two mirrors, he would watch himself die a thousand times. The tan smear on the walls followed his every movement. It would scream and die as well. The whole ship. Him, alone, as a solitary object. As an individual, attached to no one and nothing.

Unit Cygnus X-1 stopped and collapsed against the steel wall. He was flushed and still moaning, his arms wrapped tight around himself. His mind was spinning so quickly he thought the people riding the tiny Earth must be thrown against the inside of his skull and liquefied. The lights in the cabin seemed to intensify, but they were no longer blinding. When they started to flash red in futile warning, he almost laughed.

And then, suddenly, he did laugh. He chuckled, then giggled, and then without knowing why he was guffawing loudly, hysterically. Tears started to stream out of his eyes. He could barely catch his breath, he was laughing so hard. He rolled around on the floor and pounded the ground with his feet and grinned uncontrollably, so wide his jaw ached. He let out a long breath and lay flat on his back, staring up at the naked, spread-eagle, now tan, now red smear on the ceiling and feeling the ship vibrate beneath him.

He felt warm. He had never been so much in his own body as right now, when he was about to be ripped out of it. Each sting, ache, was _his_, each breath he took kept_him_ alive a few seconds longer. The Everythought of Man was in him, but they were separate, not him. Enemies. The Black Hole was an enemy. He was alone in the pit of a cosmic colloseum, and he would have to fight soon, and he knew he would lose, but it would be_his_ loss and _his_ death alone. He would put on a grand show, he thought, and he would not be back for a curtain call, no matter how much they applauded.

The ship rocked a final time, then broke apart and was gone. For a bare second, Unit Cygnus X-1 was floating in endless space, grinning at the gallery of gently canting stars all around him. Then the lion pounced. There was pain, and he screamed, but the pain flared for only a second before he was stretched out and spun into the Black Hole like a spider web on the breeze.

The last Act proved to be truly special. The Everythought crowded themselves together to witness the death of their brother. As he approached the Black Hole, thoughts and feelings lost to Man for eons ripped through his mind. The Everythought followed along in lockstep, inhaling those sensations like a heady drug. They rode each violent crest of fear and trough of despair. They made love as one atop the mountain of experience his sacrifice was bringing them. It was the height of ecstatic joy. It was erotic in its intimacy, daring and powerful in its simple force.

They all agreed: it was the show of the century.

They huddled even closer as Unit Cygnus X-1 collapsed. It was almost time now, they thought. They felt his fear, and his sudden laughter, felt it as their own.

It was a memory they would revisit in the coming years, they knew. They would live the death of Unit Cygnus X-1 a thousand times, marvel at it as their greatest undertaking, and masturbate to the gaudy brutality of it all. Unit Cygnus X-1 was the right man for the job, they smirked. We should not have doubted. They foamed at the mouth and danced and groped desperately at one another in their fear and joy and lust.

And then, finally, it came. And when it came, Unit Cygnus X-1 screamed, and they screamed with him. All of them, because they were as one. And they thought as one that the end was coming, that the lights would dim and they would applaud politely, and shuffle their feet and put on their coats and wander back out to the street and finally home to the warm and canting sea.

But it did not end. Instead, they watched and felt as the first particles of Unit Cygnus X-1 were stripped from him and shot towards the unknown heart of the Black Hole. They watched and felt as more and more of him separated, lined up single file, atom by atom, and slid down towards the unbelievable blackness. They screamed in his fear, and writhed in his pain, but it would not end. Like a man being electrocuted, they clung convulsively to the source of their pain. They were fused to Unit Cygnus X-1's tortured body, lashed to his senses with no hope of escape until his death.

That death seemed less and less imminent as they watched him slow. Where he should have fallen into the dark at speeds beyond reckoning, instead Unit Cygnus X-1 slowed to a stop, floating, mouth tight in an obscene grin, stars reflecting in his eyes. The members of the Everythought screamed in the intolerable pain of depressurization, feeling their bodies explode from the inside and be ripped away into the intense gravity well all at once. At first they simply reeled with the pain, unable to understand what had happened. Then it dawned on them as one, and they knew instantly that it meant the end of Man.

As Unit Cygnus X-1 shot faster and faster towards his death, as they fell after him, chained to him in their writhing pain, the flow of time dilated, slowed, began to crawl.

For him, it was over.

For him, death had come in the blink of an eye.

But for them, sitting stationary on Earth and yet living his experience, the incredible speed of his plummeting body meant that the blink of an eye could take millennia. The faster they went, the slower they would move, and the longer their screams would continue to be torn from their hundred billion throats.

They felt, as one, the crushing and undeniable horror of Relativity.

In the darkened amphitheater of Man, Unit Cygnus X-1 was not dead; he was dying. It was a dying that stretched out before the Everythought like a ribbon a million miles long, a climax that would last for eons, a pain that would not end.

It was dread and tragedy. It was sardonic justice, and it showed.

It showed in his eyes, eyes that they would have their whole lives to admire.

They all agreed: It was the greatest death scene ever performed on the cosmic stage, and their chorus of endless screams, the ovations of the Everythought, would rise from Earth in praise of that performance like the thick smoke of a funeral pyre forever and ever and ever.

And still Unit Cygnus X-1 floated, face fixed in a grin.


End file.
